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New research from customer service company Genesys finds that when it comes to reaching out to their customers online, over half of consumer-facing Fortune 500 companies are "socially shy." On the contact pages of their website, more than half of these companies don't provide their Twitter handle or a link to their Facebook pages. And 27 percent don't provide links to their Twitter or Facebook profiles anywhere on their websites at all.

"This is a classic example of where consumer behavior is changing much faster than companies are adapting," Tom Eggemeier, Head of Sales at Genesys told me in an interview earlier this week. "Companies are still seeing social media through the lens of marketing, not as part of an overall brand execution strategy."

What it all boils down to, says Genesys, is the fact that social media tends to be seen by large firms as merely a means of marketing. Something that Eggemeier thinks is a mistake.

"Companies don’t understand that social media is not just a marketing vehicle. They aren't realizing that there needs to be a brand execution discussion. Of the actionable tweets and Facebook posts a company gets, only about 20% relate the marketing - the rest are about service. Sales and marketing is the promise - but service is the delivery. Companies need to start integrating the service and marketing aspects of social media."

Another surprising finding of Genesys's study is that 90% of the companies they studied didn't provide an email address in their contact pages. Instead, about 83% of them had a contact form - something they note consumers see as a "black hole" and tend to avoid using.

"A large percentage of customers still use and prefer to use email as a way to contact companies," Eggemeier told me. "But we think that some big companies are hesitant to provide email addresses because they're concerned about spam or scraping."

Despite those concerns, Eggemeier thinks that given the ubiquity of email, companies need to do better at providing email addresses to their customers.

On the whole, the research demonstrates that the largest consumer-facing companies are still struggling to adapt to the ways that the Internet is providing them to reach out and engage with their customers. Although many companies have readily embraced social media for marketing, the customer service piece is coming much more slowly.

"We believe social media is going to change the way companies provide customer service," said Randy Brasche, Director of Marketing and Media at Genesys. "Our observations showed that some companies are making strides in this area, but in the Fortune 500 as a whole, it just hasn't made that much of an impact."